“It’s expensive to be poor,” Shlachter says.
Bad Credit
The biggest eye-opener, they say, has been finding so many capable people banished to poverty by a stupid mistake, like getting busted for drugs. Weissman and Shlachter hire those people as managers, with, they say, excellent results. They give them incentives for collecting 100 percent of the rents on time and for finding tenants for vacant sites.
“Nothing makes us happier than cutting bonus checks,” Weissman says.
Frank Rolfe and his partner, Dave Reynolds -- Frank and Dave, as they’re known in the industry -- say the 20 percent return many parks throw off annually is enough to get the genteel set over the idea of owning a community of ramshackle double-wides -- extra-wide trailers that have to be transported in halves.
Rolfe and Reynolds own 100 parks in 16 states and also run the Mobile Home University, an academy that holds three-day boot camps for aspiring trailer lords for $1,999 a person. An increasing number of his students, Rolfe says, are bankers and engineers.
The beauty of a trailer park -- for its owner, anyway -- is that once a tenant trucks a home to a site, then lowers it onto a pad, as it’s known in the business, and hooks up to the electricity and septic systems, he’s unlikely to leave. It costs at least $5,000 to move a home, a sum that trailer dwellers rarely accumulate more than once, Rolfe says.
“We’re like a Waffle House where everyone is chained to the booths.”
Tech Refugee
One of Rolfe’s former pupils is Jefferson Lilly, who has an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and is a former Bain & Co. consultant. Lilly, 46, spent 10 years selling software for various tech firms, including MBlox Inc., a company that makes mobile-phone texting systems. Then he got sick of it. In March 2007, after countless hours of prospecting, he found, on EBay, a 66-pad park in Slaughterville, Oklahoma, 1,600 miles (2,600 kilometers) from his apartment in San Francisco.